Studies in Demopathy and Pope’s Visit III: It goes so deep and we’re so clueless, they don’t even try

I’ve posted some items on the attitude of Muslims towards the Pope during his visit. The picture below was taken in Nazereth during his recent visit.“And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and if the Hereafter he will be one of the losers.”Qur’an, Aal ‘Imraan 3:85.

By the standards of modern tolerance this is problematic however one reads it, even if whoever refers only to Muslims. After all, isn’t secular, civil society about the marketplace of ideas, even religious ones, and isn’t the highest form of any religion voluntary, adherence from conviction and love, not from fear and coercion?

But if whoever refers to everyone, Muslim and not, it goes beyond “problematic” to “slap in your face” when the sign is hung out — with translation — to “welcome” the head of another religious tradition on a highly public occasion.

There were other passages from the Qur’an they might have cited, for example:

Surely, those who believe, those who are the Jews and the Sabians and the Christians – whosoever believed in Allaah and the Last Day, and worked righteousness, on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.
[al-Maa’idah 5:69]

But for many (all?) Muslims, the former passage supersedes this more tolerant one. The generosity of acknowledging that God will be merciful to those who worship him in their own fashion disappears once Islam is completely revealed, according to an internet site that presents itself as moderate. (Note that on the question of whether non-Muslims deserve to live the same religious authority uses of the very passage here dismissed as depassé.)

Apparently not (except for Fox News). My search for images of the pope’s visit to Nazareth finds no such image published by the news agencies. It’s all holding hands with Muslims and Jews and singing odes to peace and tolerance.

Rosen said that he regarded the criticism of Benedict as “not really fair” and noted that before the pope departed Israel on Friday, he decried anti-Semitism in unequivocal terms and made many of the points critics said were missing from his speech at Yad Vashem. If there’s a pattern, Benedict’s admirers say, it’s that his public relations skills are not as strong as his theology — but that he tends to make up ground once he recognizes a problem.

Doubters, Rosen said, should look at the pope’s involvement in a broad interfaith meeting held in Nazareth. Representatives treated their different religious traditions “as a sort of blessing and enrichment, and not as a sort of tension and strife,” he said.

IMO, the most significant thing is that this interfaith meeting took place in Israel.

interfaith shminterfaith. it’s all crappola. if there were no faith there would be no need of useless inter.
sure, there would still be other divisions. but why add an artificial, intense one to all the others?

Holocaust Guilt vs. Holocaust Shame: On the Crisis of Western Civilization This is a longer version of what appeared in the Tablet. Richard Landes, Jerusalem @richard_landes [email protected]Read More »